Perception is the brain function that assigns meaning to stimuli.The emotion is intense affective state, very complex, from the REACTION, while mental and organic under the influence of certain internal or external excitations. In the excitement there is strong influence of the instincts, and the inferiority of non-rationality.

Experiences are what you live ... both the actual impressions (ie what actually happened), as the psychological and critical (ie, what do you think of q lived with you for cooperating q, q impressions which left you and criticisms regarding this experience) ...Everything will depend on what you focus on your experience, because every living thing has several angles to look at.

Sensation - perception - experience

I found Peter Gardenfors' 'conceptual spaces model' very helpful in trying to understand the difference as well as the relations that might take place between them.

http://www.amazon.com/Conceptual-Spaces-Geometry-Thought-Bradford/dp/0262572192

subconceptual-conceptual-symbolic

Perception is the brain function that assigns meaning to stimuli.The emotion is intense affective state, very complex, from the REACTION, while mental and organic under the influence of certain internal or external excitations. In the excitement there is strong influence of the instincts, and the inferiority of non-rationality.

Experiences are what you live ... both the actual impressions (ie what actually happened), as the psychological and critical (ie, what do you think of q lived with you for cooperating q, q impressions which left you and criticisms regarding this experience) ...Everything will depend on what you focus on your experience, because every living thing has several angles to look at.

Does this mean that the experience is generated by the meaning assigned to the stimuli? What role emotion plays in creating the meaning?

Sensation is the ability of the organism to detect the physical energy in the environment when we come in contact with them. Perception is what you see, can hear or realize by interpreting the that physical energy and the experience is that perception is meaningfully stored in the memory.

Is there something in between sensation and perception?

Thank you everyone for you input. I think my confusion comes from reading the french scholar Paul Fraisse. He uses "perception" of time when referring to very short intervals - milliseconds up to about 20 second. When he is referring to longer intervalls of several minutes or more he uses the term "experience". I think that maybe this is due to a general view of perception as a something that is only possibly when the percept is right in front of you. Thus, perception of events extended in time is a contradiction in terms. I think that is maybe the reason for using the term "experience" rather than "perception". But, than again, isn't perception a sort of experience? Then the two terms would mean the same thing, the difference is only due to the technical limitation of what I suspect may be an overly rigid definition of "perception".....

>Helen, I am inclined to agree with your distinctions of perception versus experience etc. To throw another wrench in the pot, I would add the element of detection. All of the distinctions are generally synonymous in normal conversational parlance; however when adopted by the psychological community, attempts are made to hone down slight esoteric differences which may or may not exist. I was once "corrected" for indicating perception in place of sensation. The difference may lie in the stimuli crossing some threshold into full consciousness. My final comment on this matter is that differentiation of perception to awareness requires such a pre-informed acquaintance that confusion and misunderstanding is bound to intrude.

As regards the distinction between sensation and perception, I think it might be equally foggy as the distinction between perception and experience. After studying the mind-body problem for a few weeks, I suspect that it is a remnant of the cartesian "ghost" in psychology. Bodily sensations are seen as mindless sensation and perception is seen as the minds interpretation of the body's signals. More modern data shows that we cant really talk about sensation without perception, or the sense organs can't operate without the interpretations of the mind. Congenitally blind people who receive retina transplants later in life doesn't perceive or see faces at first. the brain has to learn what it is seeing... and there are other examples. From neuropsychology (which is not my field, but anyway..) we know that the activation pattern even from very basic sensations show up in higher cortical areas, there is not much of sensation going on unless there is also selection and interpretation taking place or in other words there is a lot of top-down perception going on also in the supposedly "mindless" sensation process. Maybe it would be more relevant to make the distinction between automated cognition (perception were we instantly know what we are perceiving) and controlled cognitiona (were we have to ponder for a while to make out what's going on around us) but I don't know....

I find a bit confusing the usage of the term 'cognition'. If it covers automated as well as controlled processes it seems to be too vague.

An interesting article regarding this:

Rethinking the cognitive revolution from a neural perspective: how overuse/misuse of the term 'cognition' and the neglect of affective controls in behavioral neuroscience could be delaying progress in understanding the BrainMind.

by Cromwell HC, Panksepp J.

http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/21345347

There is a book perception and sensation by Goldstein. Perhaps that might help you.

http://www.amazon.co.uk/Sensation-Perception-International-Edition-Virtual/dp/0495601500/ref=sr_1_10?ie=UTF8&qid=1346600612&sr=8-10

Sensation means responding by the central nervous system to an elementary, basic stimuli impinging on receptors both from external and internal environment (e.g., nociceptive, visual, auditory, tactile etc stimuli). Perception is a higher level process based on data from sensations and previous experience (i.e., memory). Sensation-processing and perception-processing can be pre-conscious which means that there is no corresponding subjective experience "lived through" by the subject. In many, if not majority of cases sensations and perceptions are conscious-level cognitive phenomena reflected in experience. Realistically, there are rarely single sensations as the sole contents of conscious experience. In conscious experience we have a conundrum of perceptions, thoughts, imagery, affective feelings, etc. If sensations are studied experiments are designed where it is possible to abstract a sensation from the complexity of perceptual experiences. Therefore, experiments for studying sensations should be very simple in terms of stimulation formats.

According to James Gibson, perception is detection of information and sensation is to "be aware of" sensorial stimulation... and both are "experiences" in the sense that both are contacts of the organism with stimulation. Perception does not necessarily imply a conscious experience. In fact all animals perceive because all of them detect information form their environment. On the other hand, perception as detection of information may have to be learned.

In order to perceive something, a person needs to have experienced a phenomenon and then interpreted it.